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Dear Family & Friends

This post is largely made up of a letter we sent to extended family members and friends to share our desire to adopt. The outpouring of love we received was phenomenal.

We want to share a part of our lives we have kept relatively private for the last couple of years. Despite desperately wanting and trying to start a family, we have been unsuccessful. After testing, we were officially diagnosed with infertility. We decided to pursue fertility treatments but without success.

You may be asking yourself why we kept our infertility a secret. To be honest, we truly believed the next month or with the next treatment we would be expecting. We wanted to surprise everyone and share our excitement with you instead of the pain of infertility. Unfortunately, that day never arrived.

While we are disappointed that we were not able to have a biological child, we know there are other paths to become parents. We are now considering domestic infant adoption to start growing our family. While we have always considered adoption, we had planned to possibly adopt “later”. We didn’t know later would come so soon.

While we have had many ups and downs along our infertility journey, we are excited to be continuing our journey to start our family on a slightly different path. Of course, the path will have its own challenges. We do not expect adoption to be easy, but who said parenting is easy?

We are in the very beginning stages of the adoption process. We are currently attending meetings with different adoption agencies in hopes of finding the best one for us. Adoption is not an easy or fast path to parenthood, and we are preparing ourselves for a period of waiting before we can officially become parents. The waiting is a lot like pregnancy except we don’t know how long the wait will be. In the meantime, your support would mean the world to us.

One piece of information we have heard consistently from adoption social workers is that most adoptions today are made through personal contacts rather than adoption agencies. What does this mean? A potential birth family could be only a few acquaintances away. To help improve our odds of meeting, we plan to share our story whenever and wherever we can. We’ll be sharing on a variety of social media platforms, including Facebook and Twitter. We hope you will share our story as well. You could be the connection we need.

We would be happy to answer questions you may have about our journey thus far and the adoption process itself. If you don’t feel comfortable commenting on a specific post, email us at recipeforfamily@gmail.com. If we don’t know the answer, we’ll find someone who does and share what we’ve learned. To keep you updated on our adoption journey, we invite you to read our blog regularly. We hope to use this space to share information about infertility and adoption with family and friends as well as connect with potential birth families.

We appreciate the time you’ve taken to read our first post and your support as we build our family.

Chris & Jessica

Chris and Jessica are a sweet-tea-sipping, laughing-addicted, animal-obsessed couple who reside in the countryside of Virginia. They're pursuing domestic infant adoption and can’t wait to become a family of 3 or 4. Will you be part of their journey?